Pros: - Great cost to performance ratio
- Great design
- Amazing keyboard
- Impressive Speakers (For a laptop)

Cons: - Wider than most 15.6 inches
- Heats up after a while (this is very common with gaming laptops though, especially thin ones)

Other Thoughts: - I'd certainly recommend this product to others. If you want a non-bulky laptop with a high amount of performance and storage, this is a great laptop for you.

Pros: The computer is thin, lightweight, easy to carry around. Good specs with a competitive price. Backlit keyboard is a plus

Cons: After just 9 months of use, the right fan is broken and started rattling whenever in use, causing the entire chassis to vibrate. Message MSI for support, hopefully they will reply on time. Had a HP laptop for 8 years and never have any problem.

Other Thoughts: I really wanted to like this laptop and support MSI. However, this problem will probably deterred me from purchasing anything from MSI in the future. It is a $1700 laptop when i bought it, and the quality doesn't live up.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Vick,

Thank you for choosing MSI, sorry to hear the issue you reported. Please kindly contact our support team directly at usreview@msi.com or at our support toll free phone number 888-447-6564 M-F 6AM to 6PM PST and we will be more than happy to assist you in resolving your issue. thank you.



Best Regards,

MSI Review Team | usreview@msi.com

Pros: Slim
Keyboard
CPU
SSD
Style

Cons: Trackpad
Battery

Other Thoughts: I originally bought the MSI GS60 Ghost-013 and sold it due to not being happy with the screen. But then after trying other laptops, I realized the MSI's have more pro's then cons and ordered the 470 instead so it would have SSD & HDD. I don't know if the previous one was defective or what, but the screen on this one is EXCELLENT..love the laptop, it's fast, stylish and comfortable to use. The trackpad is not very good, but I use an external mouse anyway so that's not a problem for me. By the way, this is the 4710HQ not the 4700HQ as advertised, which was a nice surprise. Highly recommended!

Pros: Cool key, good processing power and graphics, fairly durable

Cons: Bad trackpad/external mouse experience:
- I have loaded different operating systems, disabling the trackpad while using external mouses, and updated drivers. Long clicks after 2 seconds do not detect release. It ruins almost all games and productive editing i would do on this computer.

Other Thoughts: Unless the clicking bug I have experienced out of the box is some rare outlier, I absolutely do not recommend this computer.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,
Based on the symptom you reported, we suggest you checking following steps below since many reasons can cause the situation like this ,
1. If you have any external devices hook up tio system remove it and retest.
2. Check and ensure you have udpate chipset driver and touchpad for system. www.msi.com
3. If you need further assistant, please feel free to contact our technical support department directly at our toll free number 888-447-6564 from M to F, 6am to 6pm Pacific standard Time.

Best Regards,
MSI Review Team | usreview@msi.com

Pros: Boots up fast. Great graphics. Lightweight.

Cons: Battery only lasts 90 minutes or so, if I'm playing games. Longer if I'm not.

Other Thoughts: The font on the keyboard bothered me at first. I got used to it after a while.

Pros: - Very fast & powerful
- Very light
- Great display
- Runs on the cool side
- Best bang for the buck at $1099

Cons: - Keyboard has an unusual font
- It looks like the battery is tough to access
- The power brick is unusually large - it reminds me of an old Game Boy

Other Thoughts: Wow. To replace my 5-years-older MSI gaming laptop, I must have checked out every laptop offered by Newegg to find the best bang for the buck. I also checked to see the offerings on other websites, at Best Buy, etc. After lots of research, this laptop was the clear #1 bang for the buck that I could find.

You just can't get this combination of specs on other laptops, even at a higher price. Sure, there are others with 1 TB HDDs, but few operate at 7,200 rpm. Sure, others have larger SSDs, but many don't come with a HDD. Sure, others have powerful processors and graphics cards, but none of them can cram all the hardware into a body that weighs 4.4 pounds! If you're looking for a combination of power and portability, you're not going to find a better laptop than this, regardless of price.

Even knowing all of this, I was still impressed when it arrived. Compared to my old 5 y/o MSI laptop...
- It really is that light. Even though it's only about 1 pound lighter than my previous laptop, it's a very noticeable (and quite satisfying) difference
- It really is that fast. Multitask all you want, this computer isn't going to start slowing down when you open multiple programs and leave them open for an extended period
- It runs much cooler than I expected. At idle or minimal use, it runs 7-10 degrees C cooler than my previous laptop. I haven't tested it at high stress so I can't comment there, but when it comes to average use, I'd say this computer runs on the cool side
- The battery is better than I expected. As a gaming laptop, I was expecting a 2-3 hour battery life, but this can go 3-4 hours, mayyyybe 4-5 hours if you're careful
- The graphics switching technology is much improved. On the old laptop, I would have to manually tell it when to switch graphics. Then I'd have to wait a couple seconds while the screen refreshed. That, and other issues, made it such a hassle I just left it on dedicated graphics and that killed my battery life. On this laptop, the graphics switch is seamless and automatic. If you're surfing or word processing you'll be on integrated graphics, but if you load a game or something like Photoshop, it will automatically switch to the dedicated graphics card.

Also:
- It says I was ordering a machine with a 4700HQ processor, but it came with a 4710HQ
- It came with a nice laptop carrying case
- Thank you Newegg for providing a free mouse with the order

To summarize, if you're looking for power and portability at a great price, this is probably the best laptop you're going to find.

Pros: Specs
Weight
Aesthetics

I wanted a fast and light laptop, ostensibly for work but if it can play most of the things in my steam library with high quality, then who am I to argue? This laptop does those things perfectly, no surprises.

I really like the power button, which indicates if you're running on integrated or dedicated graphics with color, and the Intel tool to control which software uses which is easy and useful.

Bluetooth is useful for getting one image off my phone quickly.

Cons: Screen feels flimsy, I feel like I need to be very careful with it. This is the trade off for light weight, and the light weight is more important to me, but it is something to consider.

Keyboard can't be set to white. 95% of the LEDs under the keys will be white under this setting, but 5% (mostly in the bottom row) can't quite make it--some have a strong blue tinge while others have a strong green tinge. I had to change from white to something like ice-blue to make this less noticeable, but there's still green lights on the bottom row. I'm not sure if this is an issue with all keyboards or just mine, but I'm quite irritated with it.

Other Thoughts: It's similarly spec'd to my 3-year old home-built desktop, which cost about the same amount of money back then. But you're paying for engineering, portability, and a battery.

Windows 8 is not my favorite thing in the world but with a pretty small amount of work you can make it behave pretty much identically to windows 7, and there are a couple new features which are appreciated. Anyways, if you want to use Windows you should upgrade to Windows 10 for free this July regardless which version you have currently.

I'm not really one for "flashy," and in that way this laptop is perfect. It looks like a thing of quality without being ostentatious.

The fan kicks on and can be distracting (in my dead-silent office), but it's actually kind of an interesting tool--an indicator for CPU usage greater than 5-10%. It's alerted me to a locked up program once or twice.

Pros: - Very light
- Very fast
- Very expandable
- Decent build quality

Cons: - Attracts fingerprints like crazy
- No official Linux support (though most things work out of the box; see other thoughts)
- Some upgrades require disassembling the laptop

Other Thoughts: I'm running this with Arch Linux (canned Windows as soon as I got it), which has been running flawlessly since day 1. Only a few things were a little tedious to get set up such as Nvidia Optimus and the soundcard, but after spending a day or two getting everything working I haven't looked back.

I don't think the touchpad is as bad as people say it is. It's not the best touchpad out there, but it gets the job done. Scrolling works fine, and with the Synaptics driver (for Linux) you can setup one-finger, two-finger, or "ipod-style" circular scrolling.

As for the battery, I think it's pretty decent when you take into account the horsepower this machine packs. The advertised battery life is pretty much what I get, which is fine most of the time.

One thing I don't like is the layout of the motherboard. The RAM slots and both M.2 slots are on the underside of the motherboard, facing the keyboard. So if you want to replace either of these parts you need to take out the whole motherboard, which requires a lot of disassembly. I've done this twice so far, both successfully, but there are a lot of ribbon connectors which leaves a lot of chances to mess something up. The SATA drive on the other hand can be replaced with minimal effort and is accessible as soon as you take the cover off. Fortunately upgrades like that don't happen very often, so it's not that big of a deal.

My other complaint is the lack of support for Linux from MSI and other vendors. In this day and age, vendors should really be supporting OS's besides just Windows, especially with the advent of SteamOS. I ended up writing my own program to set the keyboard backlight colors in Linux since the SteelSeries engine only works on Windows. It only took me about 4 hours working by myself, so there's no reason why large companies like MSI can't support Linux. It would have saved me the time of having to reverse-engineer the backlight protocol.

Politics aside, this laptop is great. It's the perfect combination of portability and power, which is exactly the reason I bought it. The design of the cooling system in particular is one of the best things about it; having independent CPU and GPU fans and pulling air in from the top instead of the bottom. It makes a perfect replacement for my desktop when I'm travelling.

Pros: pretty
fast boot
light

Cons: battery
touchpad
support

Other Thoughts: I was pretty stoked about this laptop. Maybe it was all the reviews and the consumer in me that got all hyped up. After using this for a bit, I will repeat many things on other posts -

It's a very nice laptop. Pretty. It's fast on the boot and it's light. Not too shabby.. But if you're not gaming or NEED a good graphics card, save your money. I could have gone with a $500 machine and been happy.

4 eggs if the touchpad wasn't as bad as everyone has reviewed.
5 eggs if their support read tickets, and replied more timely.

The battery as others have mentioned. 3-4 hours tops if you're using it just for browsing.

The touchpad - terrible, terrible, terrible. You will not want to use this. If you have used a laptop in the past and have always used a touchpad, move on, you won't like this laptop. I now have a wireless mouse I'm using with the trackpad disabled, which if you read other posts, that's what has been recommended. I'm dead serious, if you're like me and like to use a trackpad and don't want to use a mouse, stay away. I wish I had listened to the other reviews.. I would not have purchased this laptop if I knew it was that bad.

Support - 7 days later, I still don't have an answer from their support department pertaining to the 1 finger scrolling of a document/website. I sent a very clear support ticket stating: 1) I updated my drivers and 2) How do you do "1 finger scrolling on websites/documents. I don't see it in the settings." - Their response? - "Update your drivers and go to the settings to setup scrolling" (no 1 finger scrolling in the settings). They didn't even read my email. :-/ 7 days later, still not getting a response. "We'll look into it and get back to you.." waiting...waiting.."

Customer service is a major buying point for me. At this time, simply because of support's lack of engagement, lack of actually reading msgs that are sent, and lack of being timely.. This most likely was my 1st and last MSI laptop.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,
If you have any questions or concerns regarding the product, please do not hesitate to contact us directly at usreview@msi.com or contact our great technical support team at our toll free number 888-447-6564 M-F 6Am to 6Pm pst. and we will be more than happy to assist you, thank you.

Best Regards,
MSI Review Team | usreview@msi.com

Pros: Great CPU - i7 4710. MultiTasking is GREAT. System never hangs up when doing multiple tasks. Transferring multiple gigs of video, installing programs/games, sending stuff through my network, surfing the web all can be done at the same time with 0 slow down. I freaking love that

Lots of ram, 12gbs. Probably more then you need unless you video edit

Decent GPU. GPU isnt super high end, but I have not had a problem running any games. Just played through Alien Isolation at ULTRA settings with everything maxed out at 1080p at 120hz on a 24" monitor with this laptop. Ran great, over 60fps 90% of the time.

SSD is fantastic. System goes from off to desktop and browsing the web in less then 7-10 seconds. Never actually counted but it is really that fast.

Screen is very nice, its just like an IPS screen

Cons: The only things to note is that the screen is a bit flimsy. Just be cautious, doesnt take off the score for me. The laptop also picks up fingerprints, so cleaning it off becomes routine if you care about that. Also I do wish it had just ONE more USB port. I run this laptop on a desk half the time with a keyboard/mouse/monitor/cooling pad hooked up and all the USB slots are taken by those. If I want to plug in an external drive or a external disc drive I need to do it with my monitor unplugged. Not a big deal, just a minor thing.

Other Thoughts: This is an update to a review I posted after I bought the laptop in December. Ive had it for a few months now and this thing is still a beast.

Some people seem to have issues with the laptop bricking or blue screening but I wouldnt be fully convinced that it was the laptop that was the cause and not the user so easily. I experienced an issue when windows updated once, where the system seemingly got stuck on 100%. I thought the thing was bricked at first, after multiple forced restarts it would still hang at 100%. But after a few more restarts and letting it sit the problem corrected itself. This is a windows issue, not a system issue in my opinion. Some people may have been too quick to assume it was bricked.